Reflections on Stabbing Intifada

Must Both Sides Exercise Restraint? - Ben-Dror Yemini

The young man approached a group of police officers, pulled out an axe and managed to hurt two of them before he was immediately shot in the head by other cops in the area. It didn't happen in east Jerusalem. It happened in October 2014 in the borough of Queens in New York. The terrorist was Zale Thompson, 32, an American who had converted to Islam.

No one thought for a minute that the police officers hadn't done the right thing. No one said that "both sides are required to exercise restraint." But that's exactly what the American administration's spokespeople, led by Secretary of State John Kerry, have been saying in the past week.

The use of a knife is not random. Slaughtering has become trendy. As far as the American administration is concerned, these are poor people acting out of distress. That is complete nonsense. Africa's poor don't turn to terror. It has nothing to do with poverty. It has to do with incitement and brainwashing.
(Ynet News)


With Attacks, Palestinians Proclaim: We Don't Want to Live Alongside You
- David Horovitz

As was the case at the start of the 2000s, when Hamas and Fatah terrorists were training, arming and dispatching suicide bombers to target our buses, malls, and restaurants, we set out each day knowing that people around us want to kill us. For now, they are generally using less devastating methods than back then. But potentially, there are more of them. And they are right here among us. The brainwashing has been so effective that they come at us ready and willing to die in the act of killing a Jew.

In bloody, unmistakable capital letters, the perpetrators of this new round of evil mayhem proclaim to Israelis: We don't want to live alongside you. We want to kill you and force you out of here.
(Times of Israel)


If Israel disappears - Mudar Zahran

Mudar Zahran

Since 1948, we Arabs have been taught that all we need to do is get rid of the Jewish state, and ‎everything else will go well after that. But that day did not come, nor does ‎it seem to be coming, as Jordanian opposition figure Emad Tarifi once told me: "It seems the fish in ‎the sea are not betting on us feeding them Jews."

In addition, we Arabs have given our dictators carte blanche to impoverish, terrorize, oppress and ‎destroy us all in the name of "the great Arab struggle to end the Zionist entity." The outcome of this has ‎been clear: While Israel made 10 new breakthroughs in cancer and cardiac treatments in the last two years ‎alone, we Arabs developed new execution methods. The latest is death by drowning in a cage, as ‎shown in an Islamic State group video two weeks ago.‎

We Arabs have wasted seven decades of our existence awaiting Israel's demise. It is time to think of the future, and whether Israel's "disappearance" should be our ‎ultimate wish.

What would happen if, one day, Israel were to disappear? While it does not seem feasible, it is the day around which entire Arab political, social and economic systems revolve.

If these Israel-haters got their wish to see Israel disappear, what would ‎happen?

 

Israel is the only reason Iran does not yet have nuclear weapons. Iran could buy the ‎technology to produce them, or could learn it quickly the way Pakistan did. Why has Iran been slow in ‎doing so? Because it learned a lesson from the experience of Saddam's Osirak reactor, which Israeli jets reduced to rubble in 1981.

Iran is not the only evil power in the Middle East: We also have Islamic State, which has now spread across ‎Iraq, Syria, Sinai and Libya, with clear ambitions to enter Jordan. Islamic State has not entered Jordan yet, and this is not ‎because of any fear of the Jordanian army. After all, the Global Firepower website ranks Jordan's army at ‎the same level as the Iraqi army, which Islamic State has defeated many times. Islamic State does not dare enter Jordan for one reason only -- its fear that Israeli jets would catch up with it 15 minutes later.

To those Arabs, Muslims, Westerners and others insisting that Israel must be erased from face of the ‎planet, I say: Don't bet on it, as Israel is becoming stronger every day through its democracy and ‎innovation, while Arab countries are getting weaker through dictatorship and chaos. And be careful ‎what you wish for, because if you were to get it, you too would most likely disappear, unless you ‎yearn to be ruled by Iran or Islamic State.‎

 In short, if the day were to come when Israel falls, Jordan, Egypt and many others would fall, too, and ‎Westerners would be begging Iran for oil.‎

We can hate Israel as much as we like, but we must realize that without it, we too would be ‎gone.‎

Mudar Zahran is a Jordanian-Palestinian who resides in the U.K.

[Israel HaYom][Hat tip: MW]
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UPDATES:

A Soundtrack for Palestinian Violence - Jodi Rudoren & Rami Nazzal

Music CDs sold in the West Bank feature songs like "Stab, Stab."
     
"Stab the Zionist and say God is great," declares one song. "Let the knives stab your enemy," says another. A third song urges, "Say hello to being a martyr."
     
Then there is "Run Over, Run Over the Settler."        
(New York Times)
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Ya'alon: Israel Is Surrounded by Jihadists - Bridget Johnson 

Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon, speaking at the U.S. National Defense University said:

"Those who claim that the problem is settlements - they murdered Jews before the construction of any settlements in the West Bank....Western like-minded people are ready to be deceived, manipulated by this kind of propaganda, forgetting the most important distinction between good and evil, going to relativism and other distinctions of victims and victimhood." Ya'alon said a cooperative strategy with the U.S. to tackle the violence must be "based on moral clarity."
(PJ Media)